Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) represents a key technology of the 21st century, attracting substantial interest from a wide range of scientific disciplines. With regard to clinical neuropsychology, a multitude of new VR applications are being developed to overcome the limitations of classical paradigms. Consequently, researchers increasingly face the challenge of systematically evaluating the characteristics and quality of VR applications to design the optimal paradigm for their specific research question and study population. However, the multifaceted character of contemporary VR is not adequately captured by the traditional quality criteria (ie, objectivity, reliability, validity), highlighting the need for an extended paradigm evaluation framework. To address this gap, we propose a multidimensional evaluation framework for VR applications in clinical neuropsychology, summarized as an easy-to-use checklist (VR-Check). This framework rests on 10 main evaluation dimensions encompassing cognitive domain specificity, ecological relevance, technical feasibility, user feasibility, user motivation, task adaptability, performance quantification, immersive capacities, training feasibility, and predictable pitfalls. We show how VR-Check enables systematic and comparative paradigm optimization by illustrating its application in an exemplary research project on the assessment of spatial cognition and executive functions with immersive VR. This application furthermore demonstrates how the framework allows researchers to identify across-domain trade-offs, makes deliberate design decisions explicit, and optimizes the allocation of study resources. Complementing recent approaches to standardize clinical VR studies, the VR-Check framework enables systematic and project-specific paradigm optimization for behavioral and cognitive research in neuropsychology.
Highlights
Over the past few decades, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as one of the most rapidly advancing technologies of the 21st century, attracting substantial attention from a variety of scientific disciplines, including neuroscience
We propose a general and multidimensional evaluation framework for neuropsychological VR paradigms in the form of a checklist (VR-Check), and we illustrate the application of this framework in a concrete research project
The traditional psychometric quality criteria remain valid for newly developed tests, including VR paradigms
Summary
Over the past few decades, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as one of the most rapidly advancing technologies of the 21st century, attracting substantial attention from a variety of scientific disciplines, including neuroscience. A fast-growing number of neuropsychological VR paradigms are being developed [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], paralleled by decreasing costs of hardware components and the increasing availability of open-access software systems for creating new VR paradigms in a customized manner [13,14,15,16] These advancements open up many opportunities to investigate the clinical potential of VR, they increasingly present researchers with the challenge of defining the optimal paradigm to answer the research question at hand and leverage the advantages of the technology. Screening the VR literature for suitable paradigms, for instance, how should one evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a particular paradigm, weigh them against each other, and systematically compare quality across several candidate tasks? when developing an experimental VR paradigm de novo, what task features are important to consider in the design process, which qualities should an ideal VR task possess, and are there trade-offs in these qualities on which a deliberate design decision must be made?
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